Lavaca Veteran Continues Search For Those Lost In Vietnam

CORRECTION: Vietnam veteran Garnett “Bill” Bell retired from federal service with the Department of Defense ranking of GM-14, the equivalent of a lieutenant colonel. In a report about Bell’s work during and after the Vietnam war that appeared in the Nov. 12 edition, his retirement ranking was incorrect.

A signed copy of “Leave No Man Behind” is available for $20 at billbell@pinncom.com, or at Amazon.com. In a report about author and Vietnam veteran Garnett “Bill” Bell that began on page 1A of Monday’s edition, Bell’s email address was incorrect.

Editor’s Note: This report is the final of a series profiling local war veterans in honor of Veterans Day, which was Sunday. The series began Thursday.

LAVACA — Nearly 20 years after retiring from the Army, Garnett “Bill” Bell still gets calls from people hoping to find the loved ones they lost in Vietnam.

Bell, 69, has been the man to call since fairly early in his 33-year military career, after he received extensive language training.

A native of Greenville, Texas — where he grew up in the shadow of the 101st Airborne Division and dreamed of becoming a Screaming Eagle — he joined the Army on his 17th birthday in 1960.

He had never heard of Vietnam, but in 1965, he went there as an infantryman, and saw two years of combat before the Army discovered he had a knack for languages.

No one was more surprised than Bell.

“In high school, I took Spanish and dropped out in two weeks because I couldn’t handle it,” Bell recalled.

Based on a couple of aptitude tests, the Army selected him to undergo intensive training in Vietnamese, Thai and Laotian. Eventually, those eight-hour days in the classroom — along with an epiphany — paid off.

“After I got in, I started hearing about all the casualties in the central highlands, and I started thinking, ‘If I learn this language, it could save my life, or I could help save someone else’s life.’ So I began really concentrating. I’d put the earphones on and listen to tapes for hours. … It was so hard, none of it made sense. And then one day, I had the earphones on, and there I was, listening to everything this guy was saying.”

In 1973, Bell became the American interpreter-translator for Operation Homecoming, seeking the release of POWs in Hanoi.

During the last days of the Republic of Vietnam — April 1975 — Bell’s family was among those being evacuated from the embassy in Saigon in connection with Operation Babylift. His wife and son were killed and his daughter critically injured in that operation. Bell himself was evacuated by helicopter on April 30.

He returned to Vietnam as chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs in Hanoi, and in 1988 became the U.S. government’s field investigator for the first POW/MIA search-and-recover operation in postwar Vietnam.

Now living in Lavaca on a former sheriff’s ranch for boys, Bell married the daughter of a Vietnamese military officer who came to Fort Chaffee in May 1975 after the fall of Saigon.

“I was chief of security under President Ford when the Vietnam refugees came to Fort Chaffee, and I worked with her father on security there. That’s how I met her,” Bell said.

In addition to his first daughter, who remains hospitalized with permanent disability from the evacuation, Bell and his wife Sue, a nurse, raised two other children, now grown.

After leaving the Army in 1993 as a lieutenant colonel, he became an investigator for the 12th Judicial District, which he continued to do until recently. Occasionally, he still works as a courtroom interpreter.

In his leisure, he likes to fish, and he brings the catch home for dinner, because “all Vietnamese like fish,” but he declines invitations to join his friends dove- or deer-hunting on and around his 80 country acres.

“After you’ve shot at people who are trying to kill you, it’s not too much fun shooting little animals,” he said.

Today, when Bell gets a phone call about someone lost in Vietnam, he tries to help by translating some bit of paper discovered, or identifying the purpose or travels of some artifact.

One recent call was from a woman whose brother was shot down over Vietnam, and she had received information about a blood chit — a small cloth or flag containing a message in several languages asking the finder to help the soldier or his remains get back home.

Blood chits, sometimes sewn into a soldier’s clothes, might contain bits of gold or silver to pay for food or reward a helper, Bell said — or a wire that could be used to cut a tree limb and build a shelter, or as garrote to wield against an enemy.

“Sometimes you find something that didn’t make sense before, but now it does,” he said.

Tiny clues found decades later can make all the difference. Bell said sometimes if a pilot saw a fellow pilot shot down, he might make a note of the location, but in the heat of the moment, the note might not be accurate.

“It could be off by a block, which is 10 kilometers. Well, if you’re 10 kilometers off, that’s a lot of ground when you’re searching for remains,” Bell said. “Then one day a farmer runs across a .38 in the weeds.”

Bell said 305 people remain on the list of American soldiers and civilians last known to be alive in Vietnam, and the mission to find them continues.

“The mission is to accomplish one of three things: The return of the live man, the return of the remains or the completion of an investigation that explains why neither of those can be achieved,” he said.

In 2004, Bell wrote “Leave No Man Behind,” a book about the search for American POWs and MIAs in Vietnam.

One of his reasons for writing the book, he said, was to counter the mentality that America lost the war in Vietnam.

“I see a lot of vets who say we lost the war, but the mission was to contain communism, and we did that. We did lose 58,000 troops, but we did it while killing 1.3 million communists,” he said. “Today, a quarter of the population of the world is free because of what the Vietnam vets did then. Citizens of Malaysia and Indonesia, two of the world’s largest Muslim nations, are able to freely worship Islam because of our efforts in Vietnam.”

Bell said many people continue to think incorrectly that Vietnam was a civil war, or that the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong were two different organizations.

A communist country since 1975, Vietnam is a land of “80 million people run by 3 million,” mostly because they cannot have firearms, Bell said.